Gerry Hassan: Stop seeing separation in black and white

The times they are a changing all over the world, from Greece and Spain to the USA and China. There is unrest, voices of protest rising and authorities reacting with confusion as they cling to the wreckage of failed economic orthodoxy.

At the same time, the battle of Scotland unfolds; one that isn’t life or death or black and white, thankfully. But to some it seems that way.

The official independence campaign saw John Swinney this week declare his support for a “highly integrated UK financial services market”; Alex Salmond was sanguine at the Leveson inquiry when asked about British or Scottish media solutions. This isn’t exactly the separatist fanaticism painted by some opponents.

On the other hand, the pro-union campaign with its “positive” slogan, “Better Together” is portraying a “Better Yesterday” Britain, the mythical land of post-war social democratic fairness and order that never existed and we can’t return to.

The contours are clear. We have two significantly flawed campaigns facing each other, both of which are conservative and cautious, high on rhetoric but little substance. This is CFC Scotland: content-free campaigns and we have to be wary they don’t irreversibly harm our political environment.

Neither side seems to have much appetite to address the big challenges and issues Scotland is going to face. Much easier for each to pose an abstract vision of independence versus a fantasy version of the union.

Scotland’s future should instead be about bringing to the fore the questions we face as a society. Then we could work out which kind of constitutional settlement most aids the kind of Scotland we aspire to.

These will include some of the fundamentals that are shaping our society. There are the demographic pressures building in Scotland. We have an ageing population as more of us live longer, with resulting pressures on public services that are difficult for politicians to address because elderly voters turn out more to vote. Look at once rabid-right-winger Michael Forsyth defend bus passes for the affluent older voter.

There is also the issue of how we nurture young people. It is true that public bodies now talk of early-years intervention, but we need to address more important things, the power of emotional literacy, the issue of love, play and relationships.

We have huge strains and tensions in our democratic system for all the rhetoric of “new politics” a decade ago. Scotland is a truncated democracy where the voices of “forgotten Scotland” have been ignored by our political class for at least a generation.

Then there is the size and nature of our public sector and how we afford it. We will soon face the biggest public spending cuts since the war, and somehow we have to find a way to avoid the twin cul-de-sacs of the accountant-consultant mindset and the traditionalist defend-everything approach.

Related to this is the question of distributional choices and consequences. The people who gain most from our public services are the middle class who know how to work the system, advocate and protect themselves; and the people who it least helps are those who most need it. We need to start revisiting this and asking if affluent Scots cannot make a contribution to the greater good.

Baby-boomer Scotland is one group that is asset-rich and gained from the bulge in property prices, and who could contribute something back to help young people get into the housing and job markets.

There is the question of how we want to do business. After the crashes of RBS and Rangers FC, two of the most totemic Scottish global brands, can’t we at least reflect on the limits of freewheeling socially irresponsible financial-bubble capitalism?

We need explicit debate about Scotland’s future and about what different futures might look like. We cannot hark back to the past. Part of Scottish opinion seems permanently to live in the world of 1945-75 and yearn for the return of the British post-war settlement and the ordered, managed society that went with it.

We cannot go back to the near past because it was a product of numerous factors, one of which was the nature of the international system of global capitalism with fixed exchange rates. All of this began to fall apart in 1971 with the abandonment of the Bretton Woods world system of monetary management.

We have to aim our aspirations and dreams higher. We can’t have pseudo-participative democracy forums or the Potemkin village gathering of ‘civic Scotland’ as the answer. That is what one version of the great and good have always done: talked the peoples’ talk while hoovering up the committee places and making sure they remain centre stage.

Instead, we have to try to change and widen this debate from the 1980s frame of mind. Independence and pro-union supporters have to recognise that unionism and nationalism are not enough on their own to debate and decide the future. We need different ideas: communitarianism, self-determination, new economic thinking.

Fundamental to this is the relevance of empathy, dialogue and listening, and being able to recognise that, whatever your views, the other side(s) have a rationale and legitimacy. Too many nationalists think there is no case for the union, and there are too many unionists who have no insight into the power and pull of the call for independence.

I think we need, first, a campaign against CFC (content free campaign) Scotland and secondly, one for a different Scotland. That requires a real debate. One where we pose the difficult, painful choices about what kind of Scotland first and foremost, and ask ourselves what do we want to be?

From that we could then explore whether we want to be independent or not. And in the process we will have positively sketched out the kind of future we want and shown a self-government of the mind which will aid us getting to where we want.